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Report: 90% of nurses considering leaving the profession in the next year

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Re: Report: 90% of nurses considering leaving the profession in the next year

#291

Post by mikkergp »

chimprich wrote: post #203

My wife is a nurse in the NHS. She actually saves people from cancer, or at least prolongs their lives. Her work is difficult, with huge responsibility. She gets a pay cut this year in real terms. I make slight improvements to computer systems. In most of the jobs I've done, despite my best efforts to work for reasonably ethical companies, I've not been convinced I've made anyone's lives better. Yet my salary is 2-3…

It's an interesting problem, because we currently align economic 'productivity' and pay rather than social value and pay, which is efficient since we don't have to redistribute resources between industries or roles, and resource redistribution is a dirty word, at least in America. My wife is a doctor and I make significantly more than her working as an SRE, when her job is significantly more difficult (particularly emotionally) and time consuming than mine. She's paid relatively well on a societal scale, but I'd still call it a labor of love. If you're not in one of the high paid specialties, you don't do it for the money.

Even in the (US) medical system, pay/insurance reimbursement is based on the number of procedures you do, not how involved the treatment is. This is why surgeons get paid so much more.

Re: Report: 90% of nurses considering leaving the profession in the next year

#293

Post by lghh »

mbg721 wrote: post #81
weatherlite wrote: post #13

Hard profession but one of the last things to be automated imo, guaranteed income for next 30-40 years. Don't think you can say the same about certain types of doctors for instance.

Nursing won't be automated soon, but automated systems will be used for things that nurses used to do (with predictably worse results).

Nurses do a lot of menial tasks that they are overqualified for. Could those not be freed up by automation so that nurses can do the high-skill tasks they are uniquely qualified to do?

I think you're right in the sense that I expect we won't shoot to automate the menial tasks first, and instead will let our hubris guide us to automate the high-skill tasks. But speaking optimistically, there's a lot of productive automation that can happen. Heck, a lot of it has already happened via digital record keeping.

Re: Report: 90% of nurses considering leaving the profession in the next year

#295

Post by slothtrop »

yhoneycomb wrote: post #234
LewisVerstappen wrote: post #207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The healthcare system in the US clearly has nothing to do with free markets considering how unbelievably opaque and regulated everything is.

Actually, that’s exactly how unfettered “free market” capitalism operates. The end game is big companies end up controlling everything, including the regulations in order to tip the scales in their favor.

The U.S. economy isn't unfettered free market, including in this sector. The policy is just bad.

Re: Report: 90% of nurses considering leaving the profession in the next year

#296

Post by throw8383833jj »

Here's my naive understanding of the situation:

It sounds like they're just being overworked. So, just have the nurses take a 20 minute break every 2 hours, to go out and take a walk. The hospital can require it if it comes to that but why wouldn't they just want to do it? and if the hospital doesn't want to do it, then the nurses should insist on it and walk off the job if not given their breaks. I would imagine the hospital would rather agree to 20 min breaks every 2 hours rather than loosing 90% of their workforce forever: they don't have a choice, they have to agree.

Re: Report: 90% of nurses considering leaving the profession in the next year

#297

Post by lettergram »

mola wrote: post #274
lettergram wrote: post #215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No one wants to hear the truth. There’s near-infinite demand for healthcare and a constrained (mostly artificially) supply. Insurance, people and government can’t solve the problem of the supply and demand by throwing money on it. You either expand supply or remove demand. Given removing demand is... not desirable. The only alternative to fix the issue is remove regulation and expand supply. That’s it. Insurance make…

You should educate yourself about how most of the western world manages to have a functioning semi social health care system. US is broken because of this blind fantaic faith in free markets deregulation simplifications. The problem is a large swath of the population that believe in all earnestly that squeezing profit is some magical tool for a functioning economy. Too bad US is so good at PR, this mind virus is wrea…

> You should educate yourself about how most of the western world manages to have a functioning semi social health care system. US is broken because of this blind fantaic faith in free markets deregulation simplifications

Most healthcare in the west is subsidized by the US. The US market is far more lucrative, so companies do R&D and make capital from the US. The US also subsidizes in terms of both military and energy almost every western country. Even then, Europe has a higher tax rate and on average is far poorer.

I’m well educated on this subject and worked in this area in the US and spent time in other countries. You have no idea what you’re taking about.

Re: Report: 90% of nurses considering leaving the profession in the next year

#298

Post by bumby »

pc86 wrote: post #85
brightball wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Insurance companies. Everything is controlled by insurance companies. You can’t do anything unless it’s exactly how insurance wants and only for what insurance will pay. It limits everything, including how every profession can be compensated simply because you can’t easily hire somebody for more than what insurance will pay for their services. You can, but the funds have to come from somewhere.

Insurance is the only industry where they agree to pay for something (in this case, "medical care"), but then after service has been rendered can decide to pay less, or not pay at all, or stop paying that provider altogether, etc. This combined with hospitals being run by non-physicians*, and people thinking being able to Google and read WebMD qualifies them to argue with their doctor about treatment plans**, healthc…

>I strongly believe that only physicians should be running hospitals.

Can you elaborate on your rationale? I ask because I've worked in hospitals run by a cadre of physicians and it was not run well. Anecdotal, obviously, so I'm curious on your thoughts on what they provide.

My worry is that it can lead to an unbalanced technocracy. It's like saying a politician needs to come from [industry x] to govern [industry x]. Technical competence is a necessary, but insufficient criteria when managing a multifaceted problem. The risk is that the front-line physician priorities would always become the organization's top priority. In reality, a hospital administrator has to manage competing priorities across many different domains.

Re: Report: 90% of nurses considering leaving the profession in the next year

#299

Post by bryanlarsen »

duxup wrote: post #41
FactualActuals wrote: post #7

High stress environment, stagnant wages unless you're a travel nurse, underappreciated during the pandemic, and having friends turn on you because they associate you with some crazy conspiracy theory. These are all reasons I've heard of career nurses quitting and going into other industries.

I was under the impression that nurses were paid pretty well (generally speaking).

Sure, there are lots of nurses making well into the 6 figures. But they're working 60-80 hours a week, most of them night shifts.

A nice 9-5 weekday nursing job makes a couple dollars more per hour than the receptionist out front.

Re: Report: 90% of nurses considering leaving the profession in the next year

#300

Post by bell-cot »

shantnutiwari wrote: post #106

The article seems to focus too much on : How can IT fix this problem? Ugggh, maybe it can't? As the main problems seem to be political, not tech related? You might as well ask how IT can be used to fix homelessness or police brutality?

My last experience in a hospital was Dec'21. ICU, at an old friend's bedside, in a large (500+ beds, "teaching") hospital that is part of a big (50+ hospitals) chain.

The nurses seemed excellent...but the amount of time and emotional energy they had to put into dealing with multiple computerized systems - just within my friend's room, to replace an empty IV bag - was staggering. The "smart" IV pump was the worst - a crappy little display, a minimized number of flaky buttons as the only interface, and the nurse had to drill down into multiple sub-sub-sub menu's to do even basic stuff.

My first thought was that you could triple nurse productivity (as in "care given to sick humans") if you had two IT tech's following each nurse around, tasked with doing all the "re-redundant data entry & dealing with computerized shit" that had obviously become the nurse's primary job.

My second thought was that interfaces which the nurse had to deal with should be restricted to 1950's-industrial-control-panel style - nothing but well-labeled, single-purpose physical buttons, switches, & dials. And the data entry that they had to do was restricted to wax pencils on well-laminated paper - which could be fed to a scanner, to update the patient records database. (Displays, say of vital signs & such, could be fancy. But the "50's control panel" rule could put an end to "oh, that information is hidden down in a sub-sub-sub-menu here..." shit.)

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